A quarter of British Christians do not believe in the resurection

[emjay]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-39153121

This is the hypocrisy of every religion. If you keep watering every story down to metaphor what the fuck is the point in buying the book at all? I have the same problem with Jews who call themselves "secular Jews", those whom like the tradition but don't buy the magic stories.

Humans don't understand that the further back in time you go, the more the fantastic claims were taken seriously as true. 

None of it should be taken seriously, that was then, this is now. 

Back then most humans believed in the purity of virgin births. Even in Buddhism the first mythology of his character had his mother Queen Maya giving birth to him avoiding the vagina.

Nobody survives the death myth if you attempted that in reality and killed someone like that in reality. But back then the readers really believed it. 

I see no point in continuing to relegate more and more of a book to metaphor. How about realizing that was then and this is now and we know better now.

I agree and the more a theist does that, the less I personally respect them/take them seriously as representative of the religion they claim to follow. I just call it wishy-washy theism that says far more about what someone wants (eg an afterlife) than what they believe.

But as an aside, and at the risk of incurring your wrath, since you keep bringing it up, I disagree with what you say on Buddhism. Though your objections may be true where it is fused with various religions, when treated as a philosophy in its own right, sans theism, I disagree. You may charge me with being a 'wishy washy' theist on similar lines as above but the difference is I'm not a theist... I neither know nor care about any mythological claims made about the Buddha by these religions, nor do I care who the Buddha was or even if he existed, because the words attributed to him... pertaining to this life... speak for themselves regardless of author. I see it as simply good psychology, and therefore see Buddhism as basically a psychological school of thought. Since the logic and observation speaks for itself, there is no faith required at all, and that was one of the points he (allegedly) made himself; the difference between faith in the unknown and knowing something through seeing it for yourself with the former disparaged and the latter encouraged because true understanding (of anything) only comes through knowing, not faith. So therefore, according to him, it doesn't matter who or what the source of the information is, just whether it's demonstrable, and therefore no teacher (including himself) should be worshipped, just what they say taken or dismissed on its own merits. So on that score his teachings about mindfulness, meditation, attachment etc demonstrably speak for themselves (to me... if they don't to you... then according to his own teachings you should dismiss them on the basis that for you they require faith in something unknown) whereas his theories on the afterlife, though logically presented and without any of the arbitrary embellishments put on them by religions in time since... presented as the logical continuation of the cycles etc observed in life, though interesting, are ultimately unknowable, and therefore since that part would require faith in an unknown, are something I dismiss. But if he were alive (and if I cared what he thought) I think he'd be perfectly happy with that... because minus religious input since, there is no God posited, just a means for living a happier life... so whatever you took from his teachings - a little or a lot - that helped in that regard, would mean it had served its purpose.

Just wanted to get that out. Other than that, I agree with what you say about religions.